An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews

12. Evangelical Jews: The Rise of Messianic Judaism

214 > 215 Historical Background The roots of the new movement can be traced to pietist and evangelical attempts, in the modern era, to promote the idea that Jews who had embraced the Christian faith could maintain elements of their Jewish identity. Pietist and evangelical missions to the Jews created an ideology that, at first mostly in theory, made being Jewish and Christian at the same time possible. Evangelical missions promoted Jewish symbols, such as the Star of David and the menorah, and claimed that accepting the Christian faith did not contradict retaining a Jewish identity but rather completed it. This innovative position involved abandoning the traditional Christian claims that the church had inherited God’s promises to Israel. Motivated by a premillennialist view that considered the Jews to be the chosen people and heir to the covenant between God and Israel, evangelicals began a journey of altering their attitudes toward Jewish customs and symbols. Premillennialism would become a central element of the theology of Jewish evangelical groups, serving as a source of commitment for bringing Jews to accept Jesus as their savior, as well as offering an ideology that justified maintaining Jewish identity, customs, and symbols. Following in the evangelicals’ footsteps, first Hebrew Christians and later Messianic Jews embraced the definition of Christians as people who had undergone experiences of conversion, or being born again, and had accepted Jesus as their personal savior. Likewise, Messianic Jews adopted evangelical ways of reading the Bible and evangelical codes of personal morality on matters of family and sexuality. There were a number of attempts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to create Hebrew Christian “brotherhoods,” or “houses,” designed to serve as centers for Jews who had converted to pietist or evangelical Christianity. Such experiments were mostly short-lived.1 Jews who converted to Christianity did not see a need to remain in such centers and for the most part moved on, searching for their place in Protestant society. Jewish converts established associations in Britain in 1860 and in America in 1915, but most members of these Hebrew Christian 216 > 217 Christian liturgy, but for the most part they followed the Protestant Presbyterian hymnology. The novelty of the Messianic Jewish movement in the 1970s and its Jewish Christian ideology was that a set of notions and aspirations that had previously been expressed only sporadically, partially, and hesitantly found a stronger and more assertive voice. Messianic Judaism, the Early Years Messianic Judaism represented a new generation that possessed unprecedented freedoms of choice and experimentation, including the amalgamation of traditions that previous generations had considered alien and hostile to each other. Before the 1970s, the evangelical missionary claim that Jews could be true to their Jewishness while adopting the Christian faith did not hold much water with potential Jewish converts. In Jewish and Christian minds alike, Jews were Jews, and Christians were Christians . But for the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, things were often different. They felt that they could make their own choices and did not have to abide by old taboos, which they believed they could transcend. The new movement attempted to turn conversion to Christianity into an exciting option, offering a new, young version of Christianity that rejected traditional views of Judaism as an alien faith. Messianic Jews were well aware of older attitudes and reacted by developing a sense of historical mission—a sense that they were crossing historical boundaries. They believed that they were working to heal wounds and bring together the truth and beauty of both Christianity and Judaism : faith in Yeshua with the belief in the special role of Israel in history. In the early 1970s, the term Messianic Judaism came into public use, designating groups or individuals who viewed themselves as fully Christian and fully Jewish and were confident about their right to express both identities. The term, however, was not entirely new, having been used in internal debates in the community of Jewish converts to evangelical Christianity as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time, it referred to a minority of converts who wanted to retain elements of the Jewish tradition and law.6 When the term was revived 218 > 219 war, conveying a sense of devotion and attachment to Israel and Jewish heritage.9 The same years also saw dramatic changes in the way Americans related to ethnic cultural heritages. Like African Americans and Native...